J. Edgar Hoover’s Plan to Detain 12,000 “Disloyal” Americans

Kurt Nimmo TruthNews December 22, 2007 It’s a revelation that is almost ho-hum, mundane, especially within the current context. “A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty,” reports the New York Times. “Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to ‘protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.’ The F.B.I would ‘apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous’ to national security, Hoover’s proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under ‘a master warrant attached to a list of names’ provided by the bureau.” Hoover, a paranoid reactionary of some renown, had meticulously compiled a list of disloyal Americans over the years and was itching to slap them in concentration camps. Truman never carried out the sweeping arrests, sans Writ of Habeas Corpus, although, in September 1950, Congress passed and the president signed a law authorizing the detention of “dangerous radicals” if the president declared a national emergency. No doubt the fact Truman did not act stuck in Hoover’s craw. Hoover had some experience at rounding up people, usually folks outside the political orthodoxy. During and soon after World War One, Congress and the Woodrow Wilson administration passed the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) and these were used in 1919 to go after the opposition, mostly anarchists and communists. Wilson unleashed his attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, and Palmer enlisted a young John Edgar Hoover as his special assistant. On 7th November, 1919, the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, Palmer and Hoover had over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested, sans Habeas Corpus. On 2nd January, 1920, another 6,000 were arrested and held without trial. These raids took place in several cities and became known as the Palmer Raids. Palmer and the government were never able to produce evidence of a proposed revolution, but this did not stop them from detaining, contrary to the Constitution, a large number of suspects, many of them members of the Industrial Workers of the World, who were held without trial, sort of like what they did in the country Palmer and Hoover declared to oppose, the Soviet Union. So it comes as no surprise that Hoover, some thirty years later, wanted a repeat of this unconstitutional activity. “Previously declassified documents show that the F.B.I.’s ’security index’ of suspect Americans predated the cold war. In March 1946, Hoover sought the authority to detain Americans ‘who might be dangerous’ if the United States went to war. In August 1948, Attorney General Tom Clark gave the F.B.I. the power to make a master list of such people,” the New York Times continues. Since the list was not used and the FBI was did not round up people they considered “radical,” we can only imagine Hoover’s frustration. According to Hoover, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights served as an impediment. In order to get around Supreme Court decisions declaring American communists had rights just like everybody else, Hoover created his infamous dirty tricks program, COINTELPRO. In addition to going after commies, Hoover used his program against the Black Panther Party, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s SCLC, the Ku Klux Klan, the antiwar movement, and others deemed “disloyal” to the state. COINTELPRO included all manner of dirty tricks, including infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planting forged documents, spreading false rumors about key members of target organizations, and even violence and assassination. All of this is part of the public record, so it should come as no surprise Hoover wanted to engage in Gestapo-like behavior prior to and during the Korean War. Of course, such behavior was not limited to Hoover. Operation Garden Plot, Lantern Spike, Night Train 84, and Rex 84 are other examples of the government’s willingness to round up people and slap them in concentration camps. “These camps are to be operated by FEMA should martial law need to be implemented in the United States and all it would take is a presidential signature on a proclamation and the attorney general’s signature on a warrant to which a list of names is attached,” the Miami Herald reported on July 5, 1987, making reference to Rex 84, short for Readiness Exercise 1984. “And there you have it,” writes Allen L. Roland, “the real purpose of FEMA is to not only protect the government but to be its principal vehicle for martial law… This is why FEMA could not respond immediately to the Hurricane Katrina disaster — humanitarian efforts were no longer part of its job description under the Department of Homeland Security.” It appears Hurricane Katrina also provided FEMA with an excuse to “dry run” its unconstitutional powers in New Orleans, rounding up “refugees” (now called “evacuees”) and “relocating” them in various camps. “Some evacuees are being treated as ‘internees’ by FEMA,” writes former NSA employee Wayne Madsen…. We are dangerously close to a situation where — if the American people took to the streets in righteous indignation or if there were another 9/11 — a mechanism for martial law could be quickly implemented and carried out under REX 84. In October 2006, Bush, taking his marching orders from the neocons and like-minded fascists, signed into law the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007, thus killing outright the Posse Comitatus Act, originally passed in 1878. In addition, the same year, the Bush neocons passed the Military Commissions Act, effectively putting an end to the principle of habeas corpus, which protects against unlawful and indefinite imprisonment. Soon enough, when Congress finally passes S1959, otherwise known as the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 — call it the thought crime bill — all the pieces will be in place to make anything J. Edgar Hoover dreamed of pale by way of comparison. Hoover had hands-on experience rounding up and detaining thousands for the crime of passing out antiwar materials or belonging to anarchist organizations and labor unions, but it really is a shame he is not around to witness the massive, juggernaut-like effort under way to go after the “dangerous radicals” of today, or at least arrange the legal mechanism to go after them when the time is right. Of course, we should not expect the New York Times to make mention of such ominous parallels, although it must be admitted they mentioned the fact after “the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush issued an order that effectively allowed the United States to hold suspects indefinitely without a hearing, a lawyer, or formal charges. In September 2006, Congress passed a law suspending habeas corpus for anyone deemed an ‘unlawful enemy combatant,’” including American citizens, beginning with Jose Padilla, the Google search engine terrorist.